I would call it "dbus performance overhead is userspace library AND context switching" See: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1939651

Or really, it isn't "context switching"; it's that there's the bus daemon in the middle which multiplies the userspace library overhead by 2, since messages are read and written twice as many times if you have the daemon in the middle.

Speeding up read/parse and marshal/write is completely separable from doing fewer read/parse marshal/write operations. Two different performance issues that aren't related as far as I can tell.